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Tuesday, February 05, 2013

News at Eleven: For a start, all the men, albeit young,

handsome specimens, had been hired for the occasion by the magazine. As she went on to write in The Bell Jar, from an outside perspective a witness would assume she was having the time of her life. Wasn't this the perfect example of the American Dream? For 19 years, a girl from a poor background has lived in some nondescript town, wins a scholarship to a top college and "ends up steering New York like her own private car".

The truth was more complex. As [Sylvia] Plath writes of her fictional persona, Esther [in The Bell Jar], she wasn't capable of steering anything, let alone herself.